And she sets off after that dope of a ?vejk and his tricks. And in this dark moment of her life when she doesn’t know where to go, she grabs the hand of a rascal, and he tugs on it to encourage her to keep moving forward.
When Dita goes to her hut, darkness is falling and a freezing wind mixed with sleet stings her face. But her spirits have lifted. However, happiness in a place like Auschwitz is fleeting. Someone is coming toward her whistling a few bars of Puccini.
“My God,” whispers Dita.
She still has a few huts to go, but in this zone the middle of the road is dimly lit, so she ducks into the first hut she comes to in the hope that he hasn’t seen her. She enters so quickly that she bowls over a couple of women and then slams the door shut.
“What are you doing coming in here in such a hurry?”
Dita’s eyes are wide open in fear as she points outside.
“Mengele…”
And the women’s irritation switches to alarm.
“Dr. Mengele,” they whisper.
As the message jumps from bunk to bunk, the murmurs and conversations die down.
“Doctor Death…”
Some of the women start to pray while others demand silence so they can hear any sound from outside. A faint, high-pitched tune filters through the sound of the rain.
One of the women explains that Mengele has an obsessive fixation with eyes.
“They say that one of the prisoners, a Jewish doctor by the name of Vexler Jancu, has seen a wooden table with samples of eyes in Mengele’s office in the Gypsy camp.”
“I’ve heard he pins eyeballs to a piece of cork on the wall as if they were a collection of butterflies.”
“They told me he stitched two children together side by side, and they returned to their barrack still sewn together. They were crying with the pain and smelled of gangrene. They died that same night.”
“Well, I heard he was investigating ways of sterilizing Jewish women so they wouldn’t have any more children. He irradiated their ovaries and then removed them to investigate the effect. That son of Satan didn’t even use an anesthetic. The women’s screams were deafening.”
Someone asks for silence. The music seems to be moving away.
And then the words of an order begin to be heard ricocheting from one throat to another as it is relayed throughout camp BIIb: “Twins to Block 32!” Inmates who are outside are under orders to relay such an order or face the possibility of severe punishment if they don’t—execution is an ever-present possibility in Auschwitz. No matter where they might be, the boy twins, Zdeněk and Jirka, and the girl twins, Irene and Renée, must present themselves immediately at the hospital block.
Josef Mengele graduated with a medical degree from the University of Munich and, from 1931, served in units close to the Nazi party. He was a disciple of Dr. Ernst Rüdin, one of the main supporters of the idea that worthless lives should be eradicated. Rüdin was also one of the architects of the law of obligatory sterilization promulgated by Hitler in 1933 for people with deformities, mental disabilities, depression, or alcoholism. Mengele had managed to arrange to have himself assigned to Auschwitz, where he had a human warehouse at his disposal for his genetic experiments.
The mother of the boy twins accompanies them to their destination. She can’t rid her mind of the gory stories about Dr. Mengele. She has to bite her lip to stop herself from crying as the children happily walk beside her, jumping from one puddle to the next. She hasn’t the courage to tell them to stop splattering themselves with mud. Her lip is bleeding.
At the camp’s entry control point, she hands her children over to an SS guard and watches them go through the metal door and head off toward the Nazi doctor’s laboratory. She thinks she may never see them again, or that when they return they’ll be missing an arm or have their mouths stitched shut or some other deformity provoked by the outrageous ideas of that madman. But there’s nothing she can do about it; refusing an officer’s order is punishable by death. Sometimes it’s Mengele himself who occupies a room in the medical area of Block 32 and other people, whom she fears even more, bring the children to his laboratory.
So far, the children have returned safely from their encounters with the doctor, happy even, after spending a few hours with him and returning with a sausage or a piece of bread that Uncle Josef has given them. They even say he’s pleasant and makes them laugh. They explain that he measures their heads and asks them to make the same movements together and individually, and put out their tongues. Sometimes, however, they don’t feel like explaining anything and evade their parents’ questions about what goes on during those opaque hours in the laboratory. On this occasion, the mother returns to her hut with what feels like a knot of barbed wire in her throat.
Dita heaves a sigh of relief because she wasn’t the one he was looking for tonight. The woman who tells the most graphic stories about Mengele has straggly white hair, which escapes from under her kerchief. Dita approaches her.
“Excuse me, I wanted to ask you something.”
“Ask away, young lady.”
“You see, I have a friend who was cautioned by Mengele—”
“Cautioned?”
“Yes, warned that he’d be watching her.”
“Bad…”
“What do you mean?”
“When he’s hovering around someone, it’s like birds of prey flying above their victims.”
“But with so many people in here, and so many things on his mind—”
“Mengele never forgets a face. I know that personally.”
And as she says it, she becomes very serious and falls silent. Suddenly, she doesn’t want to say any more; a memory has silenced her momentarily.
“Run away from him as if he were the plague. Don’t put yourself in his path. The Nazi bosses practice dark magic rituals—I know. They go into the woods and celebrate black masses. Himmler, the head of the SS, never makes a decision without consulting his psychic. They’re people from the dark side—I know. Heaven help the poor soul who gets in their way. Their evil isn’t of this world; it comes from hell. I believe that Mengele is the fallen angel. He’s Lucifer himself who’s taken over a human body. If he’s after someone, may God have mercy on their soul.”
Dita nods and walks off without a word. If God exists, then so does the devil. They’re travelers on the same rail line, moving in opposite directions. Good and evil somehow counterbalance each other. You could almost say they need each other: How would we know that we are doing good if evil didn’t exist so that we could compare them and see the difference? she wonders. There’s no other place in the world where the devil moves as freely as he does in Auschwitz.
Would Lucifer whistle opera arias?